Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 17

Muscovite Domination of the Church.

Here lay the true tragedy of the Russian Church, for this victory of the theocratic dream, this upsurge of national and religious consciousness, turned into a triumph for the Moscow autocracy and contained not only Byzantine but Asian — Tatar — features as well.

The Tatar element had possessed the soul of Russia, not outwardly but from within, penetrating its flesh and blood. This spiritual Mongol conquest coincided with the political defeat of the Horde. In the fifteenth century thousands of baptized and unbaptized Tatars entered the service of the Prince of Moscow, merging with the ranks of men in service, the future nobility, infecting it with their Eastern concepts and the way of life of the steppe . . . The two centuries of the Tatar yoke did not yet mark the end of Russian freedom. Freedom perished only after the liberation from the Tatars . . .[58]

We see this death of freedom first of all in the Church. The theocratic empire recognizes only one unlimited authority, the authority of the emperor; beside it the image of metropolitan or patriarch fades away and the voice of the Church grows weaker. In 1522, at the order of Basil III, Metropolitan Varlaam was removed and secluded in a monastery. The disgraced boyar Beklemishev wrote of his successor Daniel, “An instructive word [to the Grand Prince] was never heard from him and he does not plead on behalf of anyone; previously, metropolitans had sat in their seats in their robes and had pleaded to the ruler on behalf of all men.” The weakness of the Church was expressed particularly in the matter of the divorce of the Grand Prince from his barren wife Solomonia. This illegitimate divorce was opposed by Maxim the Greek and the Eastern hierarchs who sent their opinions. But Daniel, obeying the prince, made Solomonia a nun by force and married the prince to Elena Glinski, the mother of Ivan the Terrible.

 

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